Many websites are configured as online catalogs. These catalogs act as alternatives to traditional paper catalogs and offer enhanced navigational features when compared to their paper counterparts as well as the advantages of broad, easy distribution. Through the Internet, the market base of manufacturers and resellers may be maximized while associated overhead may potentially be drastically reduced. Well-organized electronic catalogs help consumers make good purchasing decisions by providing extensive information about products in an easy-to-navigate manner. Such catalogs allow consumers to gain information about products and to purchase products directly. Additionally, such catalogs serve as sites where companies may purchase advertising to market their products.
Electronic catalogs generally store, in a database, information about a number of products which may be, for example, electronics, housewares, apparel, video games, digital content, or any other type of item which may be depicted and/or described electronically. Each product may be described by a set of attributes that assume values. That is, each product may be associated with a price, brand, product specifications and other attributes. Some attributes may only be stored for some classes of product. For example, weight might be an attribute of laptops, but not desktop computers, while both might have a processor speed attribute.
Retailers and manufacturers may provide taxonomies for their products, including dividing their products into product lines, series, and models. Different retailers often have different levels of hierarchies in their product taxonomies. For example, the manufacturer LENOVO™ makes the IDEAPAD™ product line, the THINKPAD™ product line, and others. Within each product line, LENOVO™ makes many series of products, for example, the IDEAPAD™ line includes the “U series” and “Y series”. Additionally, within each series are many models, for example within the “U series” there are the U350 model and the U460 model. Further, within each model there may be many products, for example the IDEAPAD™ U350 having an INTEL™ PENTIUM™ SU4100 processor or the IDEAPAD™ U350 having an INTEL™ PENTIUM™ SU7300 processor. Manufacturers often provide only information about individual products rather than information about models generally. This may be inconvenient for a user that would like to compare various models rather than the many products with slight variations that fall under a model.
Further, retailers and manufacturers may vary widely in the depth of their product taxonomies. For example, while the above example shows that LENOVO™ may make many products within a model, multiple models within a series, multiple series within a line, and multiple lines of products, other manufacturers may use deeper or shallower product taxonomies. For example, the manufacturer ASUS™ makes the model EEE™ PC and within that product there are many models, for example, the 1015PED-MU17 and the 1215N. Varying taxonomies create difficulties in providing an electronic catalog having product taxonomies spanning multiple suppliers of products.
Once a retailer or other content provider has provided a taxonomy for its products, it remains for the users of the catalog system to retrieve the products using the taxonomy system. One way to do this is by performing searches using filters. Filters allow the users to reduce the potentially huge numbers of products which otherwise occupy catalogs and reduce them to manageable numbers. They also allow users to focus their searches to meet their individualized needs, as well as incorporate factors such as ability to pay or brand requirements due to purchasing contracts.
Filters may be composed of product attributes and possible attribute values which a user may select to narrow the products they wish to review. Such filters constrain the allowable values of the attributes, and thereby generate a more manageable subset of the products that the user may use, manipulate, and digest. For example, AMAZON.COM™ provides filters to narrow laptops by “Brand”. However, once narrowed by the general “Brand”, a user is still faced with a disarray of products to review. For example, narrowing the product category “laptops” by the brand LENOVO™ on AMAZON.COM™ provides 382 products with no method to further filter the products according to the manufacturer's taxonomy. Indeed, even a full text search for a LENOVO™ U350 results in eleven products with varying specifications and prices. This may make it exceedingly difficult for a user to accurately gauge whether or not they like a series or model because of minor differences of each specific product. While sites such as AMAZON.COM™ may also provide filters to narrow products by other attributes in addition to “Brand”, for example “Display Size” and “Processor Type” attributes, these narrowing attributes may span many product series or lines. Thus, narrowing by such attributes may not assist a user in comparing one product series to another or one product line to another.
While the system and method is described herein by way of example and embodiments, those skilled in the art recognize that generating a product line, series, model hierarchy is not limited to the embodiments or drawings described. It should be understood that the drawings and description are not intended to limit embodiments to the particular form disclosed. Rather, the intention is to cover all modifications, equivalents and alternatives falling within the spirit and scope of the appended claims. Any headings used herein are for organizational purposes only and are not meant to limit the scope of the description or the claims. As used herein, the word “may” is used in a permissive sense (i.e., meaning having the potential to), rather than the mandatory sense (i.e., meaning must). Similarly, the words “include”, “including”, and “includes” mean including, but not limited to.